Wanted: New Home For Compost Trailblazer

“Now I feel I’m more like a waste hauler than a visionary composter,” said New Haven’s pioneering organic-scraps-repurposer and eco-idealist Domingo Medina.

That’s because Medina now has to find a new place to make mulch thanks to the pending sale of the Fair Haven farm site that he and his pedal-powered composting colleagues have long called home.

Medina’s Peels & Wheels Composting charges subscribers $7.50 per week to help them divert food waste from the landfill and the incinerator and repurpose it instead as nutrient-rich soil.

He expressed that sober yet still optimistic assessment on a crystalline bright Wednesday morning as he surveyed the Phoenix Press Farm site, at the end of James Street across from Criscuolo Park. Medina, who founded his composting business in 2014, is now in final preparations to leave that site as the press is in the concluding stages of selling the property.

Although Peels & Wheels is thriving now and will continue, Medina is able to process into mulch only two of the four tons of organic scraps he and his fast-pedaling employees collect from 470 customers every week. Click here for a previous story in which the Independent rode along with Medina on one of his routes.

For growth to continue, however, and for Medina’s vision of a kind of perfect circle of environmental development and environmental justice to evolve, he urgently needs to find a new site to accelerate his capacity.

“I spend more time in the truck,” he lamented, as he pointed to his grey pick-up, hauling the waste to a composting site at the Common Ground High School (which operation he was instrumental in developing); to West Haven’s composting operation (on which he also consulted); and, soon to the transfer station in Hamden, where the load will then be transported to an anaerobic digester in Southington.

“So my cost is doubled to take care of moving this material out of the city and every week I have to rent a trailer. That goes counter to my model of recycling within our community. I don’t know where it’s [ultimately] going, and I have to pay tipping fees [for it to get there],” he said.

The problem is that for the past year or so Medina has not been able to find a permanent site where he can invest in equipment and increase his own capacity.

The city, through its new environmental ​“czar” Steve Winter, is helping suggest possible sites. One possibility is park land near Ella Grasso Boulevard, Medina said. Another nearby along River Street. But both are far from ideal and taking out what will be for him personal business loans to invest in equipment on land that is only leased on a year-to-year basis is far from ideal.

As he toured this reporter and composting tyro around the last batches — 82 cubic feet of mulch — which will be picked up by the University of Connecticut composters on Saturday, and as we circumambulated his sifter trommel and conveyor belt that he and Fair Haven enviro-activist Chris Ozyck will be transferring to Common Ground in the next week or so, Medina grew nostalgic for the model that had been created down by the Quinnipiac River nine years ago, and which he will be leaving in the coming weeks.

With his founding partnership at the time with Brian Driscoll of Phoenix Press who freely lent him the James Street site, and New Haven Farms (now Gather New Haven) staff that grew the food (using Medina’s locally created compost), the business thrived. 

Fair Haven Community Health Clinic diabetes patients exercised there through learning to garden and cooked their own food under tents pitched by the wind turbine (which Driscoll also supported) at the idyllic riverine location. 

No wonder there was a touch of mourning in Medina’s recollection of this perfect ​“sustainability corner.”

“When you have people with a common goal, who grow together, who put their hands in the soil with you, who share your goals, it’s hard to leave.”

Driscoll, ever a supporter of Medina, reported that in the course of his negotiations with his potential buyer (whom he did not want to identify yet), ​“I discussed his plans for the lot because Domingo was with us.” But the lot where Peels & Wheels equipment now sits and the garden rows remain unplanted, will be needed for trucks, trailers, and the new owner’s equipment.

(Click here to read a formal expression of gratitude that Medina has written about Driscoll and Phoenix Press’s nearly decade of rent-free support – a model in Medina’s view of how private business must play an increasing role in the environmental re-purposing of idle land. ​“The reason for this letter is that I want to recognize publicly the generosity of Brian Driscoll, the owner of Phoenix Press, for being open and allow in his parking lot the establishment and operation of a highly productive urban farm, a community composting operation and two beekeeping organizations,” Medina wrote. ​“By allowing access to his land, Brian supported community-based efforts that generate multiple public goods and work to increase the quality of life in New Haven.”)

So leave Medina must. ​“That’s a chapter that’s over,” he said.

But given the growth of interest in composting and the household garbage crisis, which is a major enviro-elephant in the room for the state and the nation, Medina’s passion is also powered by a business sense of the need to re-invent himself, with, first and foremost, a new site where he can accelerate capacity.

Of all the options he’s currently contemplating, Medina’s eyes light up most at the prospect of partnering with Haven’s Harvest, the local food-rescue non-profit.

Medina helped Haven’s Harvest’s Executive Director Lori Martin apply for grants, which, he said, if they come through, may put that organization in a position to purchase its own building at James Street, near Exchange, adjacent to the John Martinez School parking lot.

The building, now a blazingly purple color and decorated with a delightful mural, was last inhabited by Connecticut Laminating, and currently vacant, is on the market, he said, for $1.5 million. 

And the best part, for Medina, is that it comes with two pieces of land behind which, in partnership with Martin, he could combine and use for an expanding composting operation.

“She [Martin, of Haven’s Harvest, which collects un-eaten food from stores, restaurants, and so forth] rescues food everywhere. She’s at the top of the [food] pyramid,” Medina said. 

The food that Haven’s Harvest cannot place could go directly into Peels & Wheels’ operation. ​“That would be ideal.”

The building is also prime commercial real estate, of course, and could go any time, he conceded, to another buyer. 

Still, you cannot be in the composting and eco-justice business if you are anything but passionate and optimistic. The new location, should it come through, might not quite measure up to the idyllic Quinnipiac River oasis and yet this prospect is at the top of Medina’s list. 

“There’s enough land, it’s in an industrial zone, there’s room for bikes and trailers. And it’s right beside the Mill River Trail. I like the symbolism. It inspires me. We can change the script.“